A New Cosmist Moment: “Paradigm breakthroughs always begin with calls to great, even fantastical endeavors—to ‘storm the heavens,’ as Fyodorov once implored his followers to do. Even if Cosmism’s attempts at articulating a human project were kooky in certain respects, a great deal of tangible scientific progress emerged from its admirers. New, totalizing theories of human purpose are likely yet to emerge. Some will inspire their own waves of material experimentation and invention. But to the degree that they are reliant on more hegemonic patrons, they will likely share the fate of the Cosmists before them.”
Gaza and the Nomos of the Earth: “One way to see US foreign policy is as a dogfighting pit posing as a veterinary clinic. Dogs will sometimes get into it at the vet. But at the vet, the standard approach to a dogfight is to break them up. In any context in which break them up is not the standard approach to a dogfight—check your GPS. You may actually be in a dogfighting pit.”
JG Ballard Was Not a Prophet: “Ballard repeatedly told us that his imagination was the greatest tool he possessed, but he appreciated its limits. The technologies he was interested in are those we take for granted and the aspects of our lives he studied are those we prefer not to notice. To call him a prophet is to cheapen his achievement; he was in fact a skilled analyst of the present, who placed us all on the couch.”
Mimicry and Mastery: “…one of the great traps of modern society…is that a mediocre life, a life of unfreedom, can be rendered not just as habitual but as desirable. This is noticed by Ernst Jünger in his wonderful 1951 book The Forest Passage…’The real issue,’ Jünger observes, ‘is that the great majority of people do not want freedom, [and they] are actually afraid of it.’ But how is this possible? How can people end up, often so easily, wanting what is not good for them?”
Step it Up and Go: “Things are going a little sideways now, wouldn’t you agree? The world is not coming to an end, exactly, but our arrangements in it are breaking up all at once, threatening to wreck everyday life for a whole lot more people than just the poor mutts on the margins. The endless insults to common decency and common sense by the vicious governing blob that runs things don’t help, either. The main question du jour: when things break really badly, will they break against that vicious blob hard enough to make it stop?”
The Psychographic Network: “Alienation. Disconnection. Isolation. There has never been a period of time where so few have never belonged. We live in an age of breadth and not of depth. People yearn for identities while hundreds of generations of cultures are being eradicated in real time. Our social technologies are so weak that we don’t even know how to build communities. When people aspire to be a part of something people decry with words like ‘cult’, ‘brainwashed’, and ‘manipulated’. Meanwhile the masses fall to the next current thing (trademarked, of course).”
Through Our Phones We’re Gazing into Hell: “…power down your phone, hang out with your kids and spouse, go outside, go play with your dog, literally anything besides being a powerless spectator to the apocalypse.”
Welcome to Mad Max: “…imagine what happens when hundreds of stealthy motorcycles slip past enemy lines, and the riders start hiding in buildings or in forests, and start launching hundreds upon hundreds of kamikaze drones at enemy artillery, supply depots, in the enemy’s rear, or target any enemy forces within a 40 km radius. The air defenses would have no idea where to look. The enemy would have a massive area to search to try to find the riders, and the whole time they are getting ambushed by swarms of drones. It would be both chaotic and brutal.”
